AMD have published a new blog detailing the improvements in AMD Catalyst 12.6 and the new beta 12.7 driver, which contains significant performance updates compared to 12.4 WHQL.

AMD Catalyst™ 12.6 WHQL: A laser focus on quality

AMD Catalyst™ 12.6 represents a significant milestone in AMD’s driver development and planning. The list of resolved issues at the end of this post is certainly representative of our continued investment in quality, but it’s symbolic of a deeper systemic change. The truth is that our new driver cadence—releasing drivers as needed—gives us tremendous flexibility to provide releases that are worth upgrading to. By this I mean that you’ll begin to see meatier updates, with a single driver containing a number of fixes and enhancements that could have been deployed over several releases with our old schedule.
AMD Catalyst™ 12.7 Beta: More performance in the world’s most popular games

For more advanced users, we are also making the AMD Catalyst™ 12.7 Beta available today. In addition to all of the stability fixes described above, 12.7 also introduces significant performance improvements for multiple generations of AMD Radeon™ graphics products. In fact, 12.7 is the highest-performing driver we’ve ever released! That means that you will see higher framerates in the games you love to play, more performance in applications, and improved system responsiveness. Put simply, users looking to get the most out of their GPU would be wise to install AMD Catalyst™ 12.7.

AMD are also (finally!) enabling the new VCE hardware inside GCN and Trinity APU's.

New AMD Catalyst™ 12.7 Beta feature: Video Codec Engine

When we introduced the AMD Radeon™ HD 7000 Series in December, we also began discussing a feature of Graphics Core Next we call the Video Codec Engine, or VCE. VCE is a hardware mechanism that allows supporting AMD Radeon™ products to dramatically accelerate video encoding in a VCE-enabled application. Starting with AMD Catalyst™ 12.7, owners of AMD Radeon™ HD 7900/HD 7800/HD 7700 Series products are now ready take advantage of this feature in compatible applications like vReveal and ArcSoft MediaConverter.

Read the full list of features, performance updates and get downloads at the AMD Blog here.